Saturday, October 31, 2015

Who Has The Easiest AFL Draw in 2016?

With the
release of the 2016
AFL fixture this week, it is time for my annual assessment of the
difficulty of each club’s draw. Which clubs have the easiest and hardest draws
in 2016?To recap
here is how my assessment is done: a club’s draw is rated by summing up over
every match the ranking points of its opponents as determined by my end-of-season
AFL Power Rankings, while adjusting for net home ground advantage.This means the
rating for each club’s draw is in effect the result of three components:

-Net
home ground advantage: This is the net effect of the adjustments for home
ground advantage across the season. Not playing your home matches interstate
helps out here, as does playing clubs from out-of-town.

-The
effect of which clubs your club plays twice: This is the collective strength of
the opponents that each club plays twice. A higher rating for this component
means that you have easier opponents in your return bouts.

Putting that all together, the easiness/difficulty
of each AFL club’s draw in 2016 is shown in the table below, ranked from
easiest to hardest:

And the
winners of this year’s fixture are … the Gold Coast Suns. The Suns have relatively
easy return bouts, playing Brisbane, Essendon, Melbourne, and GWS twice, with
only Fremantle expected to be a tough return engagement.After years
of tough draws Geelong’s can look forward to an easy fixture in 2016 after
missing the finals for the first time in nine years. The Cats also get
Brisbane, Essendon, and GWS twice, and as always, are considered here to be
helped by playing some Victorian clubs down in Geelong.Port Adelaide,
Carlton, and St. Kilda should also be pleased with their fixtures. Essendon
should be pleased about which clubs it plays twice, but less pleased about the
number of times it travels interstate compared to the number of times it hosts
out-of-towners.At the other
end North Melbourne is rated as having the hardest draw, slightly ahead of
Adelaide. North Melbourne’s chief
executive even admitted to the difficulty of North Melbourne’s fixture,
though it is not helped by the Kangaroos playing some home matches in Tasmania.
Adelaide, meanwhile, has the toughest return matches against clubs, playing West
Coast, Fremantle, North Melbourne, Port Adelaide, and Geelong twice.Reigning
premier Hawthorn also has some tough return engagements, playing West Coast, North
Melbourne, Sydney, and Richmond twice. But as has been the case for the past
few years Hawthorn’s biggest advantage is that it does not have to play
Hawthorn. That puts it from having one of the hardest draws to one that is
rated somewhere in the middle.Note again though that the difference between
the easiest draw and the hardest draw averages out to about a goal a match.
Surely North Melbourne can easily make up that difference with Gold Coast, can’t
they?